People News

Mary Hatwood Futrell, president of the National Education
Association, was honored last week by alumni of the Alexandria, Va.,
school in which she began her teaching career 22 years ago.

Teachers and students of the Parker-Gray High School praised Ms.
Futrell for her "toughness," and Hazel Rigby, current president of the
Education Association of Alexandria, presented her with a T-shirt that
read: "A woman's place is in the White House. Mary for President."

P. Michael Timpane, dean of Columbia University's Teachers College, has
been named the college's new president.

Mr. Timpane, who joined the 97-year-old graduate school of education
in 1981 after serving as director of the National Institute of
Education, will assume his new position on Sept. 1.

He will be the eighth president of Teachers College, succeeding
Lawrence A. Cremin, who last year announced his plans to leave the
presidency and return to teaching and become president of the Spencer
Foundtion in 1985.

Mr. Timpane has said the college's mission is broadening beyond the
training of school personnel.

"Teachers College--in some ways the title is not descriptive
anymore. We are coming quite close to being a
human-resource-development institution in which we are training all of
those professionals who are trying to look after the intellectual,
mental, and physical behavior of people," he said recently.

Ruth E. Randall, Minnesota's commissioner of education, fired her
deputy commissioner after he spoke out twice in favor of vouchers for
private-school students against her instructions.

Jack Ardoyno was first advised by Ms. Randall not to air his views
on vouchers after he discussed them in an interview with a weekly
newspaper called The Catholic Bulletin in February, according to Laura
Zahn, an executive aide to the commissioner.

During a visit to a local district earlier this month, Mr. Ardoyno
told a group of teachers, principals, and school-board members that he
supports vouchers, contrary to Ms. Randall's professed view.

"He used his position as a platform on those views," said Ms. Zahn.
"He had been told by the commissioner not to use his position to do
that any longer."

Curman Gaines, assistant commissioner of education and a former
school principal from St. Paul, will assume Mr. Ardoyno's duties.

Gov. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who this month signed into law an
incentive-pay plan he says will improve teaching in the state's public
schools, plans to keep his children in private schools.

"I believe in public education and I think that everyone generally
should have the opportunity to go to the best public schools," said
Governor Alexander, who proposed the career-ladder plan 13 months ago.
His duty as a father, he added, is to pro-vide his children with the
best education possible.

The Governor's three school-aged children--Drew, 14, Leslie, 12, and
Kathryn, 10--attend Ensworth School in Nashville. The children have
gone to the school since Mr. Alexander became Governor in 1979,
according to a spokesman on the Governor's staff.

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